Recently, Lauren Hall appeared on the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. She was asked to explain how her proposed "radical moderation" could overcome America's social and political polarization, which has become ever more destructive under Donald Trump's dictatorial rule. Although she might not like the term, what she says here sounds to me like an evolutionary ordoliberalism.
Hall is a professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. She writes about her Radical Moderation at her Substack. I know her as one of my very best graduate students at Northern Illinois University.
Hall says that her radical moderation is moderate in the fundamental sense of avoiding excessive or extreme ideas and behavior and more particularly rejecting binary thinking. So she rejects the tribalism that forces a false binary choice of Blue or Red, Left or Right, Black or White, Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, and all the other zero-sum choices imposed on us.
But her moderation is radical because it goes beyond a one-dimensional moderation that would seek a middle ground between two extremes--a compromise in between Left and Right, black and white, either/or. Instead, she says her radical moderation is a four-dimensional moderation that recognizes that human beings live in a complex four-dimensional world: the breadth of social networks, the depth of the deep challenges of life, the heights of human achievement, and the extended historical, developmental, and generational time in which life is lived.
In contrast to this messy complexity and contingency of real human life, America's social and political polarization simplifies life into a binary tribalism: it's us or them, friends or enemies, the real Americans or those Americans who are not real Americans. This binary tribalism has created a hate-filled division not only in our political life (the vicious partisan rage that divides Republicans and Democrats) but also in our personal life (for example, families that cannot discuss politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table without fear of it becoming a mean-spirited fight).
To overcome this polarizing conflict that is tearing us apart, Hall suggests, we must first understand what it is in our human nature that has caused it. And then we must search for a solution--some way to resolve or at least moderate the conflict.
First, we must understand the evolutionary psychology of tribalism as a propensity of our evolved human nature. Hall explains how she studied the evolutionary biology of human behavior with David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University where she was an undergraduate student. She then continued those evolutionary studies in combination with political theory as a graduate student in political science. When she was a student at NIU, the Department of Political Science had "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a graduate field of study, which combined behavioral political science, political theory, and biopolitical science.
Drawing on these biopolitical studies, Hall can explain polarized tribalism as a deep tendency of human nature. Human beings have a natural desire for social membership--for belonging to a group, collaborating with others in that group, and deriving one's identity from that group. We can belong to many different groups--our family, our neighborhood, our church, our school, our profession, our political party, our ethnic group, our nation.
There's a dark side to this social cohesion of a group, however, because we often cooperate within our group to compete with those outside our group. This is the in-group/out-group psychology of tribalism. I have written about this as the evolutionary psychology of "parochial altruism"--we have evolved to be nice to insiders but nasty to outsiders. This explains why some MAGA intellectuals have embraced Carl Schmitt's argument that politics is all about the fight between friends and enemies as supporting Trump's politics of rewarding the loyalty of his friends and punishing the animosity of his enemies.
While it would be foolish and dangerous to try to suppress the tribalism of our nature, Hall argues, we can and should mitigate tribal conflict by bringing under the "big tent of liberal democratic institutions" that protect liberal pluralism without agreement on a particular way of life for America. She describes her appreciation for pluralism as a product of her life in America's liberal social order. She observes: "I grew up in a Zen Buddhist house in a Jewish town with evangelical and Mormon relatives. After a childhood spent navigating different perspectives, I went off to graduate school and studied evolutionary psychology, political behavior, and political thought. I've worked and studied with progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and everything in between and am all the better for it."
But then came Trump. She has admitted "I Was Wrong About Trump." After his first term, she thought Trump was "egotistical and uninterested in governance, but maybe not completely pathological," and therefore he would not be too dangerous in his second term. But she was wrong because she did not foresee what he has done in the first year of his second term in his vicious attacks on the institutional foundations of liberal democracy. She identifies the five most prominent examples of this: attacks on the rule of law and checks and balances, attacks on civil society institutions, undermining shared epistemological foundations (through misinformation and conspiracy theories), undermining respect for elections, and violent rhetoric and dehumanization of citizens.
America's two major political parties have allowed this to happen, Hall observes, and therefore we cannot expect the two parties to reverse this slide into dictatorial authoritarianism. The one possible solution that she proposes is to have civil society institutions--charitable foundations, universities, media organizations, corporations, and prominent citizens--to form "A Coalition for America" that would protect the seven keystone institutions that secure liberal pluralism:
1. Separation of powers and checks and balances.
2. An independent judiciary.
3. Federalism that respects state and local governance.
4. Rule of law, not rule of men.
5. Free and independent media.
6. Academic freedom and independent universities.
7. Fair and transparent electoral processes.
The fundamental principle here is to establish institutions that put power against power. Or as Madison said in Federalist 51: "This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public." This is what I have called the principle of institutional countervailance, which is deeply rooted in the evolutionary history of politics.
I have also identified this reliance on liberal institutions to secure liberal pluralism as ordoliberalism. This idea of ordoliberalism originally came out of the University of Freiburg beginning in the 1930s. The central concept of the Freiburg School was captured by the German word Ordnung or the Latin word Ordo. Liberalism, the Freiburg theorists argued, requires a market order that is a constitutional order, and thus true liberalism must be an ordo-liberalism. Some proponents of laissez-faire liberalism sometimes convey the impression that free markets can function best without any rules enforced by government, and indeed some of them (like Murray Rothbard, for example) have been anarchists. But the Freiburg ordo-liberals have argued that a free-market order is not anarchistic, because it depends upon a constitutional framework that sets the rules of the game of free competition, in which all economic agents meet as legal equals and coordinate their activities through voluntary exchange and contract. This constitutional order of liberty includes both the informal norms that arise through cultural evolution and the formal norms of legal and political design. Friedrich Hayek showed the influence of ordoliberalism when he spoke about "the constitution of liberty" as an institutional framework of impartial rules that would check powerful rulers and special interests seeking unfair advantages from government and thus secure liberty in a pluralist society.
So I see Hall's argument for protecting the institutions of liberal democracy as ordoliberalism. I also see it as an evolutionary ordoliberalism, because it is rooted in her understanding of how the evolution of human nature makes it necessary to have an institutional framework that constrains the pursuit of power and protects liberty. This reminds me of her work as a graduate student. She wrote a Master’s thesis arguing that evolutionary psychology supported Hayek’s argument for liberty under the rule of law against utopian conceptions of the centrally planned society. She extended this line of thought in a dissertation arguing for what she called “evolutionary liberty,” which applied Darwinian science to support a classical liberal understanding of liberty. She showed how a Darwinian conception of evolved human nature can sustain the arguments in the classical liberal tradition from Adam Smith to Hayek. (I have written a lot about the evolutionary liberalism of Hayek and Smith.)
Reason magazine is a libertarian or classical liberal journal with the motto "Free Minds and Free Markets." And so, as one would expect, the Reason Interview usually spotlights someone with libertarian leanings. If I am right, then Hall's Radical Moderation might not exactly represent libertarianism, but it does suggest evolutionary ordoliberalism.
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